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by runsinthefamily



Series: Nineteen [9]
Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-05
Updated: 2011-12-05
Packaged: 2017-10-26 23:15:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/288961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runsinthefamily/pseuds/runsinthefamily





	Home

She couldn’t bring herself to sleep at the estate.

It had taken more than a year to have it fixed up, and more money than it would have cost to have just ripped it down and built anew, but it was the only thing left to give her mother and so Priana waved her hand, told her new financial manager to make it happen, and went back down to Anders’s clinic to hide.

When it was finally finished, her mother threw a party. All the noble families she’d known from when she’d been an Amell, along with anyone else of note she could wrangle through the door. A formal dinner, followed by a dance, crowds of people that Priana didn’t know talking about things she didn’t care to follow.

She danced with a few of the young men to stop her mother glaring at her, smiling stiffly, biting her tongue. Maker, but these people were stupid and blind and narrow. For this they’d left Lowtown? At least down there the filth had the courtesy of looking like filth.

But when they had all gone and Leandra had turned in for the night and Priana was standing in the doorway of her new bedroom with its opulent bed and silk carpets and marble detailing, she just couldn’t bear it. She flung off her finery, strapped on her leathers, and snuck down through the cellars to the clinic. To Anders, who opened the door at her banging, sleepy and rumpled, and then took her to his grotty little cot in the back where they slept in their usual sweaty, awkward tangle.

It was a month later, stumbling in after a late, exhausting night of cleaning another gang out of Lowtown, that Anders took her arm gently and steered her away from the cellar door.

“You have a bed here, Priana,” he said. “You could sleep in it.”

“I - yes, I guess so,” said Priana. She looked up the stairs to the second floor balcony. She had no idea what her face looked like, but Anders dropped his hand to hers and squeezed it.

“If you want to.”

Her back felt like it had iron rods in it and her feet ached from heel to toes. “Stay with me?”

“Always.”

She felt embarrassed, showing him into the room. Any item in it could have supplied the clinic for a month. The fact that she was supplying the clinic didn’t make her feel like less of an entitled prat. “I don’t even like red,” she said randomly.

Anders looked around, then went over, sat on the bed, and started taking his boots off. “Spider likes the bed, at least.”

Priana came over and swiped at the pawprints. “Bad dog,” she muttered, grinning a little. “Mother hates that.”

Anders chucked his boots in the corner, shrugged off his jacket and pauldrons, and then stretched out across the sheets, putting his hands behind his head. He looked totally out of place, dirty hair, bloodstains on his neck and collar, ratty, holed socks exposing several toes. “Comfy,” he commented.

“Yeah?” she asked, her grin widening.

“Come and find out,” he invited, holding out a hand.

She went over, took his hand, let him pull her down onto the mattress. It gave underneath her, soft and luxurious. She tugged her boots off and then sat, hunched, picking at the buckles of her leathers.

“What can I do?” asked Anders.

She shrugged one shoulder. “Nothing to do, really,” she said. “This just isn’t … this was my grandparent’s room, you know? Mother took her old room back.”

Anders watched her, silent.

“It’s too big,” she said. “And empty. Bethany and I, we always … ” She sighed through her nose and began undoing her buckles, determinedly.

“I’m here,” said Anders. His hands joined her hers, slipping straps free, easing laces.

She sighed again, more softly, as she shrugged out of her jerkin. Shirt and pants and breastband and smalls. They pressed together under the bedclothes, skin to skin. It smelled of lilac and the distant scorch of ironing. The sheets were crisp and smooth. She pushed her face into the curve of Anders’s neck and smelled the tang of his sweat, the ice-and-ozone of his magic. A faint pressure against her thigh made her wiggle a bit and then smile against him as it got more insistent.

“Hoyden,” he murmured against her hair.

“Do you want to?” she asked.

“Do you?” He pulled back, looked at her.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s my room, I can fuck in it.”

He snorted a little.

“This is a new bed, you know,” she said.

“Should we break a bottle over the headboard?” He shifted, edging her thighs apart with a knee.

“I’m sure Isabela could tell us the proper protocol.”

That got a genuine laugh out of him and then it was all giggling and gasping and breathless and she would never get tired of this, never, the way he moved and the sounds he made and the look on his face when he came, astonished and agonized and all for her.

Afterward the bed smelled like sex and sweat and them. She lay in it, stretched out and lazy, and watched Anders build up the fire. “You should always be naked,” she said. “With your hair down.”

“That could get awkward, fighting bandits.”

“No, it would give you such an advantage! They’d be staring, all hypnotized, and I’d just sneak up and stick ‘em in the back.”

“So you wouldn’t be hypnotized? I knew it, you’re getting bored with me.”

“I’d just be careful not to look,” she began and then trailed off as he stood up and came back toward her. “Never mind,” she said. “I see the flaw in my plan now.”

He settled back down, spooning her. “I have to be away for a few days,” he said. “You’re welcome to sleep in the clinic.”

“No,” she said. “I should be here. Spider misses me and I know that Bodahn is getting tired of chasing me all over Kirkwall with my mail.” She stared at the fire. “This is my house. I should live in it. If only so people know where to find me.” His weight was warm and solid against her back and she pressed into it. “Do you … I mean, would you …?”

“Hmm?”

“Want to move in?” she asked. Her voice cracked, making the last word skirl upward weirdly.

Anders was still.

“You don’t have to,” she said. “I mean, there’s the entrance in the cellars, it’d be handy for the clinic, but I know that you don’t like Hightown, I don’t like it either, can’t blame you, it’s awfully close to the Chantry and of course the whole place stinks of lilac right now, they plant the damn things on every corner it’s like being choked to death by purple but I just don’t think I can …”

“Priana,” he said. “Pri.”

” … live here with just mother, we’ll kill one another before the month is out …”

“Pri.”

” … what.”

He turned her. She looked at him, his long nose, his beautiful, mobile mouth. He was smiling.

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh. Good,” she said.


End file.
